Friday, November 19, 2010

Some questions answered and George Clooney, continued.

Google Analytics tells me that this blog has had 628 visitors up to date, for the month of November. Not big on commentary you lot, but I understand that, this being a series of random things that probably don't form a whole. For some reason, though, my snippet of a story yesterday elicited a flurry of e-mails. Even a phone call or two.

~ Thank you ~

So, to answer some questions:

No, Mister Clooney is not my favourite actor. I'm more of a Boy Next Door kind of girl.

I saw Up In The Air one night in March and this little story popped into my head as I later lay in bed. Eventually I got up to write it. (Another sleepless night ...) It was a gift for The Lip, who remains a great fan of George Clooney.

Yes, I do have more stories. There are poems too. And recipes.

The photo was taken on the way to Beira, Mozambique. I need to go back there some day.

Movie most enjoyed this year? An Education.

And Roy: thanks for the offer. I'm flattered. But I'm taking a sabbatical. For now.

George Clooney and the Unseen. Part Two.

Although I never considered George Clooney to be mating material, my friends and family all teased me mercilessly. I tried to tell them how I felt: He is not a good-looking man. He is a bad, no, atrocious hunter. He is way too tall. He walks funny. He calls me Addle.
But they carried on and so I learnt to smile and ignore them. The previous faded man who had visited us, was known of only because of the outlandish pair of pants he had left behind, and the mark of his height on the wall of the fane. We as a tribe had little curiousity or wish to know more. The children followed George Clooney for a few weeks, mainly because of the novelty of it, but when that wore off, he was mostly on his own. I could see that this bothered him inordinately. I guessed it was because of his lost life of celebrity and that he missed having an entourage. The men tried to teach him, but his hunting skills remained poor. The women giggled behind their hands when he approached.

At night in the hut we would lie at opposite sides, facing each other. In the morning we woke at the same time and talked about our dream. George Clooney could not understand how we could dream the same dream together. Often we would continue a conversation that we had started sometime in the night, in the middle of a dream. It left him mystified, but also filled him with delight. After some time, once we had become comfortable together in our dream world, he showed me what it looked like in the jungle where he came from. I was enthralled by the high structures and moving machinery. The amount of people in those dreams was staggering. It was a big surprise for me to see amongst the faded ones, some that were drenched in a kind of glossy darkness. There was a dreadful odor in those arid tree-poor places, filled as they were with all these bleached and tarry people. Some nights George Clooney would meet others in my tribe for dreams. But mostly it was just him and I.
When the cool rains came, we moved closer at night. I knew without him saying so, that I was also not attractive to him. We shared warmth as cubs would do. Between us was a bond like that of a sister and a brother. It was better, because we were not born to it, but had chosen it to be so.

Then one evening there were no leftovers. I went to the grocery store. The sales clerk said artichokes are out of season. This is not San Diego. Still I dreamt of her, dipped in lemony butter, scraped carefully with teeth and sucked, the pale cream flesh, the tender flower, her skirt held like a cup, each sip bringing me closer to the moon, the vegetable pearl of her insides where the heart fans out fibrous hairs and waits a last mouthful of her green world.

Nin Andrews(1958-)

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Virginia Wolf

(1882-1941)

Never love anybody who treats you like you're ordinary.

Oscar Wilde

(1854-1900)

You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

"The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

Katherine Mansfield

(1888-1923)

"It's important to begin a search on a full stomach."Henry Bromel, Northern Exposure, The Big Kiss, 1991

Search This site

Click Here For...

My Facebook Page

It's an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence,like a love affair you can nevertalk about.For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you've been and what's happened. In the end, you're just happy you were there - with your eyes wide open - and lived to see it.Anthony Bourdain (1956-), from The Nasty Bits.

"You say the sentence or you write the sentence again and again until the tuning fork is still." - Martin Amis (1949-)

"People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing." – William Trevor (1928-)

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to." Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals." John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.

"Men are climbing to the Moon, but they don't seem interested in the beating human heart."Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), in a letter to a friend, one year before her death.

"The barbaric gleams right under the surface of all human skin."Jorie Graham (1950-)

S u b s c r i b e

"The real director of our life is Accident - a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm."Pascal Mercier (1944-)

"Talking of pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine - how good, how fine. It went down all pulpy, slushy, oozy, all it's delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified strawberry ."John Keats (1795-1821)

"Words are only painted fire, a book is the fire itself."Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"I'm what you might describe as the classic underachiever. I tread that fine line between boffin-dom and the grand amateur."Andrew Weatherall (1963-)

"The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds, his heart of hearts that the picturesdostop."Saul Bellow (1915-2005) from Ravelstein